A look ahead to next week's counter-hysteria hysteria

I think by now we all know what the usual suspects--who use wildly exaggerated claims of global economic collapse to undermine any policy proposal designed to mitigate global warming--will say in response to the next morsel of information from the IPCC this coming Friday:

The world’s richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.

But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it — with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but also better able to withstand them.

I can hear it now: 'This science sucks; global warming will actually help the world's poor! Even if the science is correct, the moment you buy that compact fluroescent bulb at least a million poor people will die as a result. And it'll all be your fault that they DIED because you thought you could mitigate the problem'. Or something like that.

Seriously though, we have to realize that adaptation is also terribly costly and it's difficult because we don't know what exactly what we're going to be adapting to. And that we can simultaneously mitigate and provide aid for the poor.